Google Banking On Open Source To Capture Enterprises With Its Cloud

If you are not building open source, then you are at a competitive disadvantage to those who are, said Google’s product manager.

Google is not leaving any stone unturned to get more and more enterprises on its cloud platform. The company is aware that it doesn’t have legacy relationships and traditional sales machinery like its competitors including Microsoft.

Recognising this fact, Craig McLuckie, Google’s product manager in charge of its Kubernetes and Google Container Engine projects, said, “Google is not an enterprise company and we are trying to become cognizant of what the enterprise needs.” He was speaking at a panel discussion at the OpenStack Foundation’s annual Silicon Valley event.

Google has been putting in a lot of efforts to lure enterprises onto its cloud platform, but the journey has not been all that easy, so far. Taking a cue from its interactions with the enterprises and the current market trend, the company believes that becoming more ‘open’ and releasing more open source software will pave the way for the company into the enterprises. McLuckie noted, “Google has recognised that open is a better way of building. We’ve come to admire the ability of the open-source community to drive innovation.”

Google official had his reasons in place for promoting open source initiatives. He asserted that building in open results in a better product for the customers and enables faster integration cycles. He said that having an open source project “Involves other companies and also allows it to absorb the DNA of these companies into the product. ”

Kubernetes is one of the best examples of how companies collaborated to come up with a remarkable product. The container management and scheduling tool was incubated by Google but is gradually becoming a standard component of many container architectures. Google open sourced the code of it and donated it to Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The project is now being developed by pioneers like Red Hat, Docker, IBM, VMWare, Huawei, Docker and Twitter.

In an interview, the Googler added that the search engine giant will also open source “other parts of its infrastructure stack.” With these insights, it is pretty clear that Google will take the open source way to enter the enterprises. “If you are not building open source, then you are at a competitive disadvantage to those who are,” McLuckie said.